


The Goblin Market

by Birdpeople (DeusExMachina)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: First Kiss, If Ronan is a Raven then what are the others?, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Blue Lily Lily Blue, Sometime before TRK
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 11:39:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7359751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeusExMachina/pseuds/Birdpeople
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam shivered and Ronan, perhaps noticing, placed a protective hand on Adam’s back. “We must not look at Goblin Men, we must not buy their fruits,” Ronan murmured, “Who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry, thirsty roots?”</p><p>Adam raised his eyebrows. “Ronan the poet. What other talents are you keeping hidden from me?”</p><p>“I do a mean river dance.”</p><p>“Ronan, Ronan, who never lies.” Adam grinned wickedly. “One day you’ll dance for me.”</p><p>---<br/>Takes place sometime between Blue Lily, Lily Blue and The Raven King. Ronan and Adam go walking through Cabeswater and encounter a marketplace there and Adam trades a secret for a fortune-telling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Goblin Market

“What the hell kind of dream is this?” Ronan asked.

Adam shook his head, mystified.

It was certainly Cabeswater, the particular trees, so old they defied identification, the sleepy greenish cast to the light, the leaves sheltering them so varied and many-layered that the water-and-honey dream sun was not visible from where they stood.

And yet, it did not seem quite like Cabeswater.

It was full of the crash of feet and hooves and bodies through drifts of brown leaves, through old, dead branches. The crowded space was filled with calls in every language Adam had ever heard before, as well as Cabeswater’s special not-Latin.

There was laughter, some of it raucous, like the cawing of carrion birds, and haggling in every direction.

Squeezed between the trees were tiny tents, tables, and blankets, each hung with garlands, charms, and wares, wreathed in dried herbs and flowers, and crammed with sellers, hawking their goods.

Scents of charred meat and sugar and smoke drifted from some of these stalls, but Adam was more interested in examining the people.

“Is that Noah?” Ronan asked, pointing, but Adam couldn’t see him through the multitude of bodies.

There were figures, nearly humanoid save for their oddly distend and jointed legs, or for antlers that sprang for the crowns of flowers and berries woven through their hair.

“Why should flowers and berries be in bloom at the same time?” Adam wondered, and Ronan snorted.

“Don’t be so literal,” he advised.

Here there were people draped in many layers of jewel-colored fabric, so sheer that Adam had to turn his head away at the immodesty of even the most heavily layered. Not that there weren’t those who had forgone clothes altogether, as Adam soon discovered. And here were some manner of folk whose faces, when Adam looked directly at them, seemed to defy description, as if the moment he tried to think what they looked like, he forgot. He watched those ones out of the corner of his eyes as one prodded a chain of tiny bells, which hung from the corner of one tent. The bells’ silver ringing was audible even over the hubbub of the marketplace, and sounded tinnily even in Adam’s deaf ear.

Adam shivered and Ronan, perhaps noticing, placed a protective hand on Adam’s back. “ _We must not look at Goblin Men, we must not buy their fruits,_ ” Ronan murmured, _“Who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry, thirsty roots?_ ”

Adam raised his eyebrows. “Ronan the poet. What other talents are you keeping hidden from me?”

“I do a mean river dance.”

“Ronan, Ronan, who never lies.” Adam grinned wickedly. “One day you’ll dance for me.”

Ronan groaned and shoved Adam with the hand that he still held to his back. “Weirdo.”

“Well, while we’re here, care to see the sights?”

“I guess,” Ronan conceded. “But I’m serious about the food. Probably best not to partake.”

“Fine by me. I want my fortune told.”

“Really? Don’t you get that enough from those Fox Way hens?”

Adam laughed. Ronan stared at him. Here, in his place of power, Adam’s laughter was a beautiful, natural, terrible thing, like the sound of those bells. He couldn’t look away.

“This is a dream fortune. It’ll probably look different from a waking one.”

Mystified, Ronan let Adam lead him to a table, stuffed to bursting with all manner of witchy thing, garlands and stones and hand-painted cards with saints on them that even Ronan had never heard of, ones with many overlapping halos or eyes in unlikely places.

Adam leaned across the table to address the old woman with the eyes of a solid, shining blue. Her hooded robe was open, revealing sagging breasts and rolls of wrinkled, marble-veined skin. Ronan pointedly looked away.

“I’d like my fortune told,” Adam told her confidently.

“And in return?” Her voice was raspy but not unpleasant, like a bow across strings.

Adam’s answer was immediate. “A secret. Mine to freely give, as yet untold to any living soul.”

The old woman nodded slowly. It was hard to tell on whom her gaze was focused. “That is sufficient.”

Adam leaned across the table to whisper in her ear, and Ronan turned his head away, resisting the urge to once again place his hand on Adam’s back, to steady him.

When Adam once more stood straight, the old woman hummed, with the full, hollow sound of the first note of a violin. “That is indeed a great secret, _magus.”_

Adam raised his eyebrows, startled. “You know who I am?”

“Of course. Everyone here knows the _magus_ and the Greywaren.”

Adam smiled, but his jaw was stiff, and it looked a might frosty to Ronan. “Then it shouldn’t be too difficult to tell me my fortune.”

The old woman considered him. “No more difficult than any other,” She allowed. She stood creakily and set to work gathering things from around the stall.

Ronan leaned in close to Adam. “What secret did you tell her?”

“One I’ve never told another living soul,” Adam said pointedly.

“Oh, come on,” Ronan whined, poking Adam in the ribs.

Adam smirked, twisting away. “For god’s sake, I’m not going to tell you _right in front of her_ before I’ve even gotten my fortune.”

“But you will tell me?” Ronan urged.

“Scout’s honor.”

“You were never a scout.”

“Well you were never such a _noodge_ but I was gonna let that one slide.”

Their bickering was interrupted by the old woman, who held something out to Adam. “Your fortune,” she rasped. “May it bring you joy.”

Carefully, Adam took the item she offered, cradling it in his arms, and he thanked her before retreating some small distance.

“What is it?” Ronan asked.

Adam was frowning, turning it around and around. The pale green cellophane the woman had wrapped it in crackled as he handled it. “A bouquet,” he said slowly, “But it looks like it’s mostly made of feathers.”

“Not much of a fortune if you ask me.”

“I didn’t, but noted.”

Ronan snorted. “What does it mean, anyway?”

“Not sure.” Adam plucked a feather from the bouquet. “Pretty sure this one is you though, _Greywaren_.”

It was a raven feather, beautifully whole and intact. As Adam tipped it this way and that and seemed to shimmer purple and insect-eye green, like an oil slick.

“Honestly I’m surprised you weren’t a mockingbird with all your bellyaching.”

“ _Ha-ha_ ,” Ronan snarled. “Who else is in there?”

Adam slid the raven feather back into the bundle. He turned it intently once more.

“Blue,” he said finally.

“What’s she?” Ronan snorted, “A magpie, for all her weird art projects? A _Blue_ jay?”

“No.” Adam withdrew a small, brown and cream feather. “This is her. A kestrel.”

“What’s that?”

The corner of Adam’s mouth twitched upward. “The tiniest breed of falcon.”

Ronan laughed. “Who’re the peacock feathers?”

Adam drew one out with a look of puzzlement. “Henry Cheng.”

“Figures.” Ronan regarded the feather. “What the hell is he doing in there though?”

“It’s a fortune, Ronan. How the hell should I know?”

“What about Gansey? He has to be there.”

Adam smiled despite himself, and drew out a long, barred feather. “A Great Horned Owl. A hunter, but a scholar, too.”

“And Noah?”

Adam’s face fell. He pulled from the bundle what look like a long, reed-like stem of wild grass. Bound to it with thread was a tiny brown skull, worn smooth.

“A premature raven’s skull,” Adam murmured. “Noah’s dead. He doesn’t owe us anything.”

Ronan once more laid his hand against Adam’s back and the latter looked up at him, grateful.

“What about you, mudlark?” Ronan asked. His words were typical for him but his tone was not, soft and unguarded.

Adam indicated one of the feathers. “Merlin.” He said. “The name of which precedes the sorcerer and for which he was named. The smallest of the hunting hawks.”

Ronan frowned. “Then who does this belong to?” From the very center of the bouquet, he pulled a feather, larger than any of the others, and so dark a brown it was nearly black.

Adam took it from him and considered it. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’s older than any of the other ones. Hundreds of years older. I’m not sure what the bird was, but I don’t think it exists anymore. This seems to be one of its smaller feathers too, from around the eyes, maybe, instead of a flight feather like the others. It must have been some kind of massive bird.”

“But who is it?” Ronan urged.

“I… I have no idea. Someone we haven’t met yet, maybe.”

Adam met Ronan’s eyes and knew in that moment that they were thinking the same thing.

 _Glendower_.

Ronan snorted, breaking the tension, and finally removed his hand from Adam’s back. Adam found that his missed the warmth. “So, Merlin, was it worth the price?”

“I think so,” Adam said. “Although now that I’ve told her it’s not a secret anymore, and it’s still mine to spend.”

Ronan looked interested. “Want to see what else this place has to offer?”

Adam hummed, observing the stalls, the people, the wares on display. “Maybe not. It won’t be here when we return, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see it again. For now I think we should just walk the forest.”

Ronan bowed. “As you wish.”

“Oh come on, really? You’re gonna Princess Bride me?”

“Hey, I restrained myself from making an ‘African or European swallow’ joke before. I deserve brownie points.” Ronan was grinning, and Adam felt a matching expression on his own face.

They walked, sometimes one helping the other over a rough or sloping patch, feet braced against a stone, one hand wrapped around a sapling and the other extended.

“Don’t think it escaped my notice that you quoted one of _the gayest_ poems you know,” Adam said finally, once they were far enough that the noise of the marketplace was no more than a distant whisper when the wind ebbed.

Ronan’s smile was a little too innocent. “What on earth are you talking about, Parrish?”

“Oh come on,” Adam scoffed. “The Goblin Market? Woman tastes forbidden fruit and is about to die and her sister goes into the forest and lets the goblins crush the fruits against her mouth while she refuses to eat and then tells the first woman to kiss it from her lips? Pretty gay.”

“Hm. Well, anything sounds gay when you say it like that, Merlin,” Ronan said lightly.

“Do you want to know the secret I told the old woman?”

Ronan stopped in his tracks. “Before Gansey?”

“Before Gansey.” Adam stopped and faced Ronan.

Ronan’s eyes were wide. He looked like he was treading the border between excitement and anxiety. “Tell me.”

Adam stepped in closer, until he was almost chest-to-chest with Ronan, then leaned forward, ghosting his breath across Ronan’s ear, cradling the back of Ronan’s shaved head with one hand.

Ronan’s hands went up uncertainly, as if he were thinking of pushing Adam away, but settled for wrapping one hand around Adam’s wrist.

“ _I’m in love with the Greywaren_ ,” Adam breathed. Ronan made a choked noise, and as Adam made to pull away, Ronan pulled him back until they were nose to nose.

“You wouldn’t lie to me?” Ronan asked in a strangled voice. It was a plea, but also, Adam understood, an out.

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Adam said steadily.

Ronan gave a shaky sigh and all the tension seemed to drain out of him. He used a finger to tilt Adam’s face and their lips met in a kiss as sweet as crushed fruit.

“What is it you do to me, Merlin?” Ronan sighed some time later, leaning his forehead against Adam’s.

“Nothing you don’t want done to you, Raven.”

“Is this a dream?”

Adam laced his fingers with Ronan’s. “You and I both know the best things come from dreams.”

**Author's Note:**

> The bouquet of feathers was based on something from my dream last night. I was reminded of it as I walked home this morning and found a goldfinch feather.
> 
> Come talk to me at my appropriately-named tumblr, quasi-birdpeople.tumblr.com


End file.
